


Shadows in the Brightest Sun

by romanticalgirl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Originally posted 11-23-08</p>
    </blockquote>





	Shadows in the Brightest Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 11-23-08

Neville doesn’t understand celebrity.

That’s not entirely true. He understands it when girls moon over movie stars and musicians and all those other famous people. He understands when blokes look at girls in magazines or on billboards advertising denims and undergarments. He understands the people that go crazy for sports heroes and Olympians and Quidditch players. That celebrity he can understand. What he doesn’t understand is all the people who look at him when he walks down Diagon Alley, as if he’s someone other than Neville Longbottom.

He asks Luna about it at the refurbished Fortescue’s, sipping a butterbeer at the empty counter. It’s an hour before she opens the place, but she’s always willing to unlock the front door for a friend. She refuses his money – she refuses money from anyone who was fighting that last day at Hogwarts – but Neville and the rest always manage to leave it behind, and he knows that she has a box she keeps it in, magicked to a manageable size. He knows the money goes somewhere, he just doesn’t know where, but he’s sure Luna puts it toward a good cause. The rebuilding of the wizarding world or the preservation of the Hornpeckled Swinglehoffers or something else equally important.

“It’s because you’re a hero, Neville.”

“Rubbish.” He frowns at the counter and then at Luna. “I’m not a hero.”

“Everyone knows you’re a hero. I’m afraid you’ll just have to get used to it.”

He watches her as she prepares the ice cream for the day, arranging flavor names where they can be seen, all of them much more eccentric than Fortescue’s ever would have made them, but still in the same flowery calligraphy. Neville had watched one day as Luna had painstakingly copied the whorls so they matched the half-burned remnants she’d found scattered across the floor. He’d been about to ask her why she just hadn’t used magic, but something about the delicate way her tongue lodged in the corner of her mouth kept him quiet. 

“It’s ridiculous. I didn’t do anything heroic. I just did what had to be done.”

“That’s rather the definition of a hero, in part anyway.” She arranges little vases of daisies and then sets them at each table except for the ones she sets on the windowsills, waiting to open before putting them on the tables outside. “A hero is someone who does what has to be done without any thought to themselves.”

“I was thinking about myself.” Neville gives her a triumphant look. “I was thinking that I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want anyone else to die and I was thinking that I had to do something or everything was going to be destroyed. We’d worked so hard, Luna. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I know.” She sets her hand lightly on top of his. “That’s why you’re a hero.” She turns his hand over and looks at the lines on it, the faint traces of scars and burn marks that they all wear somewhere on their bodies, their psyches. She traces the fragile nerves and looks up at him. There’s something he doesn’t understand in her eyes, which is natural with Luna, but there’s something else that he does. He knows the sadness that clings to her like it does to him, he knows the touch of death that clings to them all like shadows even in the brightest sunlight. 

“You’re sure you don’t want an ice cream?”

“I’ll take one if you let me pay for it.”

Luna regards him for a long time and then nods, moving to scoop his favorite into a sparkling crystal bowl. “Why is it you think you’re not?”

Neville spears the perfect scoop Luna’s made and stares at the spoon imbedded in it. “Because people still died, Luna.” Neville looks up at her, and she nods, setting a ruby red cherry on top of his bowl. “And stopping some people from dying just shouldn’t be enough.”


End file.
